Definition of "logarithm" []

• Mathematics The power to which a base, such as 10, must be raised to produce a given number. If nx = a, the logarithm of a, with n as the base, is x; symbolically, logn a = x. For example, 103 = 1,000; therefore, log10 1,000 = 3. The kinds most often used are the common logarithm (base 10), the natural logarithm (base e), and the binary logarithm (base 2). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Someone mentioned the word logarithm to me the other day, a word I had not heard for several decades."
• "Per Shang-Keng Ma, an entropy can be defined as the logarithm of the phase-space volume explored by the system over a given timescale; the states relevant for thermodynamics (mumble mumble microcanonical mumble mumble) would be the decategorification of the states used at the statistical-mechanical level."
• "An exponential is a function that increases or decreases by a certain fixed multiplicative factor whenever you change the argument by an additive shift while the logarithm is the inverse function."